Grownup Money Zen and finding your enough with Manisha Thakor

 

Episode Description: Author Manisha Thakor returns to the podcast to share insights from her new book Money Zen: The Secret to Finding Your Enough

Video Highlight: Manisha Thakor with a comment that blew my mind!

Manisha Thakor’s Bio:

Manisha Thakor has worked in financial services for over thirty years, with an emphasis on women’s economic empowerment and financial wellbeing. A nationally recognized thought-leader in this space, Thakor has been featured in a wide range of publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, NPR, PBS, CNN, CNBC, Real Simple, and Women’s Health. Prior to writing MoneyZen, Thakor co-authored two personal finance books for women in their twenties and thirties. Today her work focuses on helping individuals of all ages to balance financial health and emotional wealth. Thakor earned her MBA from Harvard Business School, her BA from Wellesley College and is both a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Certified Financial Planner (CFP). She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and rural Maine. Her website is MoneyZen.com

 
 

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Full Transcript:
Bobbi Rebell:

When it comes to money, I think we can all agree we can never know too much- or if we are being honest have too much but let’s focus here my friends. According to the Society for Human Resource Management the majority of working Americans indicate that the personalization of seminars and webinars on investing basics and financial planning is important to them. And in that same survey they add quote “Employers would be wise to add or expand desirable benefits like financial wellness to attract and retain talent”- in other words- companies need to step it up if they want to get the best people on their team. Financial Wellness Strategies is the solution. We provide the top of the line financial wellness programs for employees to create financial grownups who focus on their jobs, because they know they are in control of their personal finances. Learn more and get in touch at financialwellnessstrategies.com. That’s financialwellnessstrategies.com- The time is now to invest in peace of mind. 

Sometimes things just come together and that is the case this week. Stay with me. But first welcome to the Wellness for Financial Grownups podcast. I am your host Bobbi Rebell. Certified Financial Planner, author of Launching Financial Grownups. I also run Financial Wellness Strategies- please consider us for your employee events - workshops webinars and so on. I’m also happy to come speak about my book. 

But first we are going to be speaking about Money Zen. That is the book my friend Manisha Thakor just wrote. The full title is Money Zen: The Secret to Finding Your Enough”

 

And for this week’s quote  It is from Ellen DeGeneres: "You don't need money to be happy, but you need it to pay the bills." 

A lot of us talk about how money will not make us happy- and leave it there. But just because the money won’t make us happy does NOT mean we don't’ need it- we need it to pay bills! In other words, never say its not about the money- we need the money. Let’s just not tie that to happiness. 

And that’s where Manisha comes in. She is founder of Money Zen a joy-based approach to helping people feel calm, confidence and clarity about the role that money plays in their lives -- so they can create lives that are in alignment with their deepest values.- thus the name of her newest book Money Zen The Secret to finding your Enough. Other books include ON MY OWN TWO FEET: a modern girl’s guide to personal finance and GET FINANCIALLY NAKED: how to talk money with your honey. She has spent 25 years in the financial services industry and has lots of fancy titles and accomplishments like MBA, CFA and CFP - too much to include them all - did I mention Harvard. She’s amazing and I was so excited to dive into this latest book. 

Here is Manisha Thakor. 

 

 

Manisha Thakur, you are a financial grownup, one of my very favorites in fact that I had to have you back, welcome.

 

Manisha Thakor:

It is always a pleasure to get to chat with you

 

Bobbi Rebell:

This is going to be quite the conversation because we're going to be talking about your new book, which was so relatable to me and I know it will be to so many of our listeners. It is called Money Zen, the secret to finding your enough. And there's kind of a double entendre because it's secret to finding your enough, like enough stuff, but also that you are enough.

 

Manisha Thakor:

Exactly. I wanted the book to resonate with anyone who's ever felt like it's never enough in a variety of different ways. I'm not doing enough. I'm not accomplishing enough. Or I'm just not enough. There's so many different ways in which a never enough mindset can permeate our lives in modern society.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

this is going to resonate with so many of us because I know that I always feel that way. It's interesting. People come up to me and they say, oh my gosh, you're so busy. I can't believe all that you're doing. And I think I feel like I'm not actually doing anything, which brings me to, I think my favorite sort of zinger line in your book, although there's going to be more favorites. You say we are human beings, not human doings, but we always feel like we need to be doing more or maybe at least people like me.

 

Manisha Thakor:

No, I mean, I think it is so widespread. We are in a culture that tells us you need to do these things in order to have these things, in order to be happy. And so it is incredibly easy to develop a very toxic relationship with work and money and accomplishments, striving. in all sorts of realms of our lives. And in my research for the book, one of the things I found is this affects people of a, I mean, huge range of age, income, professions, ethnicities, geographies. It is really, I think, kind of the unspoken issue behind all of this, like burnout and... exhaustion and some of the other trends that are kind of hitting the zeitgeist right now. I think this is what is at the root cause.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

I love that. And you know, this book, on the surface, looks like a personal finance book, but you don't have money tips. You're not having solutions. You're really addressing what at the heart gets to us about money, why we have such a huge amount of anxiety, and why now we're talking so much more about financial wellness rather than just financial literacy. Financial literacy, yeah, you may know. You do need to know, of course, how your basic finances work, but that's not going to make you happy ultimately, and that's not going to give you a feeling of financial security. There's so much more.

 

Manisha Thakor:

Yes, and you know, there's a study that I know both of us have heard for ages, just doing what we do, which is the number that, you know, once you earn more than $75,000, it doesn't increase your happiness. That's the threshold. And there's some fascinating new research that's come out of Penn, University of Penn in collaboration with Princeton that says, well, actually, that study is totally wrong, but it's not. wrong for the reason people will think. It's not wrong for everyone who's saying, I live on the East Coast and I have a family of four. Are you on crack to think that $75,000 is going to make me happy? It's wrong because once you've met your very basic needs, kind of the Maslow's hierarchy of the needs, basic food, basic shelter, basic transportation, If you do not have a base of emotional wellness underlying that, no matter how much more you earn and are able to accumulate beyond your most guttural needs, it's not going to have a really meaningful long-term effect on your life satisfaction. And so personally, I feel like that was one of the pieces I'd been missing in my 30-year career in financial services. I kept thinking information, financial advice was the answer and I could help people solve money problems like I've got too many student loan, too much student loan debt, I don't know how much house to buy, I don't know what kind of insurance to get. Those are money problems but what is missing, the missing link between money and happiness is that we need to address money worries. And that's where financial wellness comes in. That's why this is not a personal finance book. That's why this is a book that looks at what are the underlying causes, and they're multidisciplinary, that can drive a person to have a never-enough mindset. And then how do we flip that script so that you can live a life of financial health and emotional wealth?

 

Bobbi Rebell:

Well, you gave me the perfect opening there because a lot of this comes from your personal experiences with wealth and your health. You literally made yourself sick with a lot of these. Give us some context. Really, even starting from when you were growing up, you had feelings of inadequacy and that led you to this striver mentality where you were buying different things to fit in different cultures. And then you actually could identify that in different settings, there were different markers of success and what worked in one setting didn't work in another, which basically exposed. how ridiculous it all was.

 

Manisha Thakor:

Yeah, well, you know, there's a term I like, small t traumas. And it refers to the kinds of things that can happen to us before age 25 when our brains are fully formed that can deeply imprint on us, even though on the surface, they may seem remarkably small. So, you know, like many people, I was bullied in grade school and... I grew up in a small town in Indiana and I was mixed race and chubby and coke bottle glasses and I just didn't fit in. And that drove me to seek acceptance somewhere else because my peers rejected me. And you know, at that age, you're in school. So I sought it through academics and pleasing my teachers. And then you fast forward to being a grownup. And academics gets replaced by work and you get rewarded not by grades, but by money. And then you step into that world and you start to learn about the peacock feathers, the signaling that we use to indicate to each other in the grownup world about how successful we are. And oftentimes, they can be for women, the status handbag, the right shoes. And to your point about it being different in different places, one of the things, when we come back to this, I had gotten very caught up in that world. But one of the things that was really ironic was when I was in New York a lot for work, there was a certain, it really was my jewelry, my bags, my heels. And then I happened to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where you look ridiculous wearing New York clothes. And in Santa Fe, it was, did you have the right cowboy boots? What was the material? Was it leather or was it ostrich? And then, you know, the jewelry was, you know, how much turquoise, do you have a turquoise belt? Which is like, you'd never wear in New York. And so the things that people judged each other by, changed, but the fact that we were that we are living in a world where so often we judge people's insides by their outsides, that does not change. And that really, in a lot of different ways, gets to the crux of this never enough mindset that many of us kind of, I would almost say it's a cult that we get sucked into.

 

 

Bobbi Rebell:

The book is very revealing about your own struggles with this. In fact, at one point you were struggling so much to keep up the pace as a workaholic. By the way, you also talk about in the book that workaholics don't necessarily achieve more. Anyway, you were very much a workaholic early in your career. You recall a time when you were on a plane and a stranger gave you pills that you took not even knowing what they were. Tell us about that. I mean, that to me was the oh my goodness. That is just hustle culture gone too far.

 

Manisha Thakor:

Exactly. So at that point in my career, I was working for an institutional asset management firm and I had an idea for a new distribution channel and I was building it out and I was rocking it and the channel was bringing in literally billions of assets under management into the firm. But it was requiring me to be on a plane literally once every three to four days for almost a decade. And towards the end of that period, I was sitting on the plane and you rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles when you travel that much. So I was in seat  1B. And I remember I had my paper strewn all over the tray table and tears were just streaming down my face. And I was thinking, I was on my way, I was from Houston to New York. And I remember thinking like. I don't know how I'm gonna make it through all the meetings that I have in the next two days. And a woman who I actually, she worked in the industry, so I'd seen her before and I knew of her, but we'd never talked, we weren't friends. And she was extremely elegant and put together and she saw that I was so distressed and she came up and she leaned down next to me and opened up this. beautiful silver pill box and you know she said here take this um you know it'll help and it was a little yellow pill and i mean at that point i didn't even ask what the freaking thing was i just swallowed it um turned out it was valium um and it turned out it did help me um at least get off that plane and stop crying but that's the mental state that i was in that i literally I was so overwhelmed, it never occurred to me to ask what she was giving me.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

Yeah, that says it all. All right, before we wrap up, you talk about being able to define your enough. What is your enough, my friend?

 

Manisha Thakor:

To me, I... When I think about the life that I want, it is full of simplicity and small joys. And I'll just tell a brief story around this because it's kind of ironic. I spent my junior year at Oxford and on the way back from England, I was kind of reflecting on what I had learned over the year and how I had changed. And on a little cocktail napkin, I had sketched out a triangle. And... I was at the top of the triangle, I wrote the word simplicity, and I wanted that to be the guiding anchor of my life. And in the bottom left-hand corner, I wrote small joys, and in the bottom right-hand corner, I wrote financial independence. And I did that because I wanted to make sure that I had the ability financially to be stable enough. that I could experience and have space for small joys and simplicity. But my triangle got tilted after I graduated and pretty soon it was upside down and the focal point was financial independence and I completely lost track of the simplicity and small joys. And the book, Money's End, is designed to help people understand if any of what we're talking about resonates. how they got off track. Because if you don't understand how, it's really hard to then implement the answers, the two-step process I describe in the book to understanding what is enough from a financial health standpoint so that you can then put your bounty and your effort and your heart and soul into building emotional wealth, which is where so many of us end up having that disconnection between money and happiness.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

And we're out of time, but I do want to encourage people to read the book because what I would be asking you about next, here's a teaser, is how we're all impacted by these images that we see on social media and by the fictional money images and money stories that were told through various forms of the media, characters that live unrealistic lives, and we could go on and on. But I want to give you a chance to tell everybody where they can find out more about you. I know that Money's End is going to be available everywhere.

 

Manisha Thakor:

in all the normal places, but if people wanna learn a little bit more about the book, you can go to moneyzenbook.com. And if you wanna take a fun quiz to kind of see where you are on this whole spectrum, just go to moneyzenquiz.com.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

Thank you so much.

 

Manisha Thakor:

Bobby, it's always great to be chatting with you.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

We all want to live our best financial grownup lives and one way to do that is to know that the people we care about are also in a good place when it comes to their money. That might mean our kids, our grandkids and yes- even our friends. But how. Its’ awkward. You see them struggling- pretending to know more than they do- or making bad money decisions but don’t know what to say- and even if you say something supportive- then what? That’s why I wrote Launching Financial Grownups. In Launching Financial Grownups I share the tools and strategies so you know what to say to take the pressure off and give those you love the confidence they need. It's about giving those we care about the right amount of help, at the right time- so they can not only learn what they need to know about being financial grownups- but also be confident they can do it- and that you will be there to cheer them on. Pick up a copy of Launching Financial Grownups - I promise you will be so happy you did. 

 

So what is your enough my friends? For this week’s extra credit assignment let’s all think about that and if you have a few minutes- write it down and hang it up somewhere you can see it- even a post it- when you are feeling less than enough. 

Next question: Did you find yourself dreaming about winning the powerball lottery when it got to a billion dollars recently? In my most recent newsletter I wrote about how we all won the lottery by just being in the U.S. with all the economic opportunities we have and got a lot of amazing comments back from so many of you- so thank you. I also shared my recent appearance sharing tips on money windfalls. Did you know the vast majority of lottery winners lose it all? If you did not get my newsletter- its free so what are you waiting for? Sign up at bobbirebell.substack.com. 

 

Loved this interview and all the great perspectives- the whole transcript is on my website along with links so just go to bobbirebell.com for those show notes. 

 

And as always so great to have Manisha Thakor on- she did a great job helping us all be financial grownups and invest in peace of mind.  

 

Wellness for Financial Grownups is a production of BRK Media. Editing and production by Steve Stewart, guest coordination, social media support, and show notes by Alliee Borbon. Artwork by Chelsea Perez. You can find the podcast show notes, which include links to resources mentioned in the show, as well as show transcripts by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. 

To get even more out of this podcast, make sure you are also on our newsletter list to get more free content to live your best financial lives. There is a link in the show notes but you can also sign up at bobbirebell.com or at financialwellnessstrategies.com. And be a friend- share the podcast with your friends by taking a screenshot and sharing it on social media. Make sure to tag me on instagram at bobbirebell1. And while your there- follow me- and if you DM me that you listen to the podcast I will follow you back. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Reading each one means the world to me. You can also support our merch shop, grownupgear.com by picking up fun gifts for your grownup friends and treating yourself as well. And finally my grownup friends, don’t forget to invest in peace of mind. Thanks everyone. 

 

 
Bobbi Rebell Kaufman